USA > New York > History of the state of New York Vol I > Part 13
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49 | Part 50 | Part 51 | Part 52 | Part 53 | Part 54 | Part 55 | Part 56 | Part 57 | Part 58 | Part 59 | Part 60 | Part 61 | Part 62 | Part 63 | Part 64 | Part 65 | Part 66 | Part 67 | Part 68 | Part 69 | Part 70 | Part 71 | Part 72 | Part 73 | Part 74 | Part 75 | Part 76 | Part 77 | Part 78 | Part 79 | Part 80 | Part 81 | Part 82 | Part 83 | Part 84
* Winwood's Memorial, iii., 317, 340 ; Hist. Syn. Dord., 155-182 ; Davies, ii., 463-467 ; Neal's Puritans, i., 259, Harpers' edition.
108
HISTORY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK.
CHAP. IV. national habits, and honest patriotism feared a continu- 1611. ance of the tempting strife. The burdens of a war-tax had become almost insupportable, and industry was crip- pled, while gallantry alone was rewarded. But, above all, it was apprehended that a well-organized army, flushed with continual victories, and led by so ambitious a general as Maurice, might soon read to the Dutch Republic the lessons which prætorian cohorts had read to Rome. Bar- neveldt and his friends, therefore, eagerly desired a peace, and the truce of 1609 was signed. As stadtholder, Mau- rice was the commander of the military force of the re- public ; an end of hostilities would, he foresaw, deprive him of a large share of his authority and influence ; he, therefore, opposed the truce. Finding himself thwarted on every side by Barneveldt, he did not disguise his hatred of the patriotic advocate ; who, in turn, could not conceal his suspicions that the prince desired to prolong the war from motives of private interest and personal ambition. Hence arose a mutual antipathy, which soon deepened, on the side of the stadtholder, into a sentiment of intense an- imosity against Barneveldt, and which the sacrifice of its hated object at length could scarcely appease .*
Swayed by such feelings of jealousy and hatred, it was only natural that the prince should take a side, in the great religious controversy which was distracting the country, opposite to that upheld by those statesmen who had thwart- ed his political views. Other reasons besides his sympathy with the established clergy, and his inveterate personal 1616. detestation of the advocate, induced Maurice to espouse with zeal the cause of the Gomarists, or Contra-Remon- strants ; which, from the time of the stadtholder's open accession, daily gained ground. Sir Dudley Carleton, who had succeeded Winwood as English ambassador at the Hague, also used the influence of his high position very unscrupulously against the Remonstrants, and took every occasion to strengthen the prejudices which had already seriously affected the political standing of Barneveldt. * Grotius, ix., 571 ; xv., 716 ; Davies, ii., 358, 406, 407, 469, 471.
Maurice sides with the Go- marists.
109
THE SYNOD OF DORDRECHT.
One of Carleton's motives for this conduct was, no doubt, CHAP. IV. the chagrin of his sovereign for his weakness in yielding to the advocate's diplomatic skill in the negotiation for the 1616. surrender of the cautionary towns. The nobles, the states, and the municipal governments, which sided with the ad- vocate, were libeled without stint; Barneveldt himself was vindictively attacked ; and the King of England again in- Continued flamed the mischief by his officious personal intermed- interfer- ence of King dling. Aware that the question of a national synod had James. now well-nigh replaced the other points in dispute, James, in March, 1617, wrote a long letter to the States General, 1617. in which he strongly urged the measure as the most ef- fectual means of establishing the Reformed faith-the " only solid cement" of a good understanding between the two countries. The arguments of the king were warmly supported by his ambassador ; a national synod was ap- pointed to be held at Dordrecht ; and Maurice, now be- come Prince of Orange by the death of his elder brother Philip, made a tour through the towns of the Netherlands to gain their unanimous consent to the measure .*
The Synod of Dordrecht assembled on the thirteenth of November, 1618. It sat for more than seven months, at a 1618. cost to the republic of a million of guilders. Foreign Churches were invited to commission delegates to the syn- drecht. od, and they all complied with the request. The Churches of the Palatinate, Hesse, Switzerland, Bremen, and Emb- den, and the King of Great Britain, as the head of the En- glish and Scotch establishments, were all represented. The Reformed Church of France appointed delegates; but they were forbidden by Louis XIII. to go to Dordrecht, and the places appropriated for them were left vacant during the sessions of the synod. The head of the Church of En- gland was represented by George Carleton, bishop of Llan- daff; Joseph Hall, dean of Worcester ; Samuel Ward, arch- deacon of Taunton ; and John Davenant, professor of The- ology at Cambridge; while Walter Balcancall was dele- gated by the king in the name of the Church of Scotland.
* Carleton's Letters, 87, 88, 123 ; Hist. Syn. Dord., 183-239 ; Davies, ii., 467-489.
The Synod
110
HISTORY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK.
CHAP. IV. After one hundred and fifty-four sessions-in the course of 1618. which the Heidelberg Catechism and the Confession of Faith were fully approved and ratified, and the Remon- strants pronounced innovators, disturbers of the Church and nation, obstinate and rebellious, leaders of faction, teachers of false doctrine, and schismatics-the business of this famous Assembly was closed on the ninth of May, 1619. 1619; and Bogerman, its president, dismissed the foreign members with the startling declaration that " its marvel- ous labors had made Hell tremble."*
9 May.
The Syn- od's pro- ceedings severe.
That the proceedings of the Synod of Dort against the Arminians were inexorably severe, ought not to be, and can not be denied. They formed a singular and memo- rable exception to the characteristic system of toleration which so nobly distinguished Holland among the nations of the earth. It would be difficult to repeat similar pro- ceedings at the present day. At the same time, it must be candidly admitted that the synod exercised upon the Re- monstrants only that ecclesiastical discipline which any Church may lawfully exercise upon those under its juris- diction, who reject or depart from its standards of doctrine. The Synod of Dort, in its supreme function, constitution- ally declared that the Remonstrants, who formed a very small minority among the clergy, and whose followers were scarcely one in thirty among the body of the people, should not teach false doctrine and heresy within the pale of the National Church, and under its apparent sanction. It was in their claimed character of members of the es- tablished Reformed Dutch Church, that the Remonstrants received the censures of that Church. If they could not approve of its standards of religion, and could not teach in conformity to them, they should have resigned their liv- ings and professorships, and have preached and taught else- where. Though the Dutch had a national religion, they had no Statute of Uniformity. Had the Remonstrants hon- estly and openly separated themselves from the Established Church, whose doctrine they could not maintain, they
* Brandt, xli., 611, “ Een recht wonderbaarlyck werck 't welck de helle doet beven."
111
DEATH OF BARNEVELDT.
would undoubtedly have found, readily and at once, the CHAP. IV. same toleration which other sects enjoyed in Holland, and which, after they had been judicially pronounced schismat- 1619. ics, they did enjoy, and do notoriously enjoy, to this day.
The fate of Barneveldt was soon sealed. He had been arbitrarily arrested, by order of the Prince of Orange, in August, 1618, as he was entering the Assembly of the Pro- vincial States of Holland. The arrest of their own advo- cate drew from the states an earnest remonstrance against such an open invasion of their privileges. But remon- strance was unavailing. The stadtholder was determined to gratify to the utmost his personal jealousy and revenge ; and Barneveldt was illegally detained three months in prison, to insure the appointment of an adverse tribunal. After forty-eight interrogatories, the advocate was con- demned to death, upon a series of political charges, the only capital one of which, and the one which before his trial his enemies had most vehemently urged-that he had treasonably corresponded with Spain-was entirely aban- doned. On the morning of the thirteenth of May, 1619, 13 May. in the seventy-second year of his age, Barneveldt was be- Barneveldt. Death of headed on a scaffold erected in the hollow square in front of the great hall of the States General. As he walked calmly to his place of execution, and looked around upon the buildings which had witnessed his triumphs as a statesman, the contrast of his unworthy doom with the glorious recollections of his career, wrung from him the memorable exclamation, "Oh God ! what, then, is man !"* Popular tradition, though its truth is doubted, to this day asserts that the insatiate vengeance of Maurice demanded a sight of the blood of his venerable victim; and the vis- itor at the Hague is still shown a little window in one of the turrets, overlooking the quadrangle of the Binnenhof, from which the prince is said to have witnessed the exe- cution of one of the truest patriots and most upright states- men that ever fell a sacrifice to the violence of party rage, or the unscrupulousness of political ambition.
* Davies, ii., 490-525 ; Van der Kemp's "Maurice," iv., 119-130, 317 ; Grattan, 241-2.
112
HISTORY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK.
CHAP. IV.
1608.
In the midst of the religious and political differences which were thus distracting all classes in the Netherlands, a number of English Puritans, weary of hierarchal op- pression, and smarting under the vulgar insults of their bigoted king, resolved to emigrate to Holland.
At the command of Henry VIII., who, for opposing Lu- 1521. ther, had received from Leo X. the title of " Defender of the Faith," the English clergy had been obliged to abjure 1534. the supremacy of the Pope. Yet the Anglican Church, under Henry, though forced to substitute the supremacy of the King for that of the Pontiff, retained, to a great ex- tent, the peculiar doctrines and the gorgeous ceremonial of Rome. As the Reformation advanced, further changes 1548. became necessary ; and, under Edward VI., Cranmer ar- 1552. ranged the terms of a compromise, which produced the present Church of England. Like all compromises, the new establishment rejected extremes. A hierarchal con- stitution was retained, and those beautiful collects, which had " soothed the griefs of forty generations of Christians," were translated into the English tongue; while Articles 1562. of Religion were adopted, and afterward twice deliber- 1571. ately revised and ratified, in which the most zealous Cal- vinist might find his own doctrines affirmed. Thus the Established Church of England took a middle position be- tween the immutable Church of Rome and the Reformed Churches of the Continent.
But when the English version of the Bible was printed, 1539. and began to be generally read by the people, there were numbers of persons who thought that the founders of the Anglican Church had not gone far enough in their re- forms. Those persons, regarding the Holy Scriptures with the veneration due to a divinely-inspired book, looked upon them as alone furnishing a complete manual in the- ology, in morals, and in political science. Relying, per- haps too confidently, upon their own interpretations, they judged that, by the standard of those Scriptures, the En- glish Church was not a pure Church ; and that, in retain- ing prelacy, ceremonies, and other " remains of anti-Christ "
The Church of England.
113
THE PURITANS IN ENGLAND.
she was attempting to serve both God and Baal. They CHAP. IV. found no warrant in the Bible for wearing the surplice ; they thought that the Book of Common Prayer savored 1539. too much of the Missal and the Breviary ; and they in- sisted that the interests of a pure religion demanded the extremest simplicity in all its external services. Hence they obtained the name of " PURITANS." The term event- 1564. The Puri-
ually designated all those " who endeavored, in their de- tans. votions, to accompany the minister with a pure heart, and who were remarkably holy in their conversations."*
Returning to England, after the accession of Elizabeth, Views of from their exile on the Continent, where they had em- tans. the Puri- braced the most rigid views of Calvin, the Puritan leaders seemed to believe that the Reformation would not be com- plete unless every thing that might suggest a single rec- ollection of Romanism should be discarded. They reject- ed, as unscriptural, the claims of the bishops to ecclesi- astical superiority. They abhorred priestly garments as badges of popery. They denounced the Prayer Book and " other popish and anti-Christian stuff" of the English establishment. They felt themselves called upon to re- form the Reformation in England, and destroy all "relics of the Man of Sin." Forms and ceremonies, by degrees, became as important, in their eyes, as creeds and doc- trines. Things indifferent became things essential. They seemed to think that a sour austerity on earth would win for them, more certainly, an eternal inheritance in heaven. They appeared to fancy themselves God's special and pe- culiar people, and more holy than their neighbors. They seemed to prefer the Old Testament and the argumenta- tive Epistles of Paul, to the Gospels and the milder Epis- tles of John. In the end, many of them conceived that the same polity which God had ordained for Israel before the coming of the Messiah, should govern both Church and State under the Christian dispensation. More than most sectarians, they were sincere and vehement in their belief,
* Neal's Puritans, i., Preface, x, Harpers' ed. ; Lingard, Baudry's ed., vi., 235, 248, 304; vii., 31-33, 103-108, 297-300, 360 ; viii., 70 ; Macaulay, i., 49-58 ; Bancroft, i., 275-285.
H
114
HISTORY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK.
CHAP. IV. and severe and inflexible in their practice. More than 1564. most enthusiasts, they were intrepid and persevering in their fervid zeal. With intense earnestness, they labored to subject political power to the supreme control of an as- cetic religion. Confident that they alone were right, they acted out their part with consistent energy. In a country which was not distinguished for toleration, they claimed for themselves immunities which, afterward, they seemed unwilling to yield to others. Eventually they grasped the authority for which they longed, and retorted upon their adversaries the wrongs of their old oppressors. Yet the controversy which the Puritans commenced was only "the wind by which truth is winnowed." Their spirit of in- quiry and dissent added a significant impulse to the grand cause of civil liberty. Their earnestness may have carried them beyond just limits ; but their very fanaticism was decreed to be one of the instruments of Providence in work- ing out great good to man. And though we may not all applaud their singularities or justify their intolerance, we should not withhold our respect for the sincere fervor with which they advocated their system, the unfaltering con- stancy with which they endured persecution, and the firm will and stern resolution with which they maintained their principles .*
1582. The Puri- tans sepa- rate from the Church of England.
Before long, the Puritans, who seem to have embodied rather the Saxon than the Norman type of the English character, began to separate themselves openly from the Church, whose government and ritual they condemned, but whose doctrines they could not wholly disavow. They refused to conform to the statutes of the realm; and the law was severely enforced. Penalties which the Puritans had advocated against the Roman Catholics were exacted from themselves. Brown, the leader of the Separatists,
* Those who desire detailed information respecting the Puritans, may consult Neal's History ; Macaulay's Essay on Milton, in the Edinburgh Review, No. 84, for August, 1825 ; Hume, v., 87-92 ; Lingard, viii., 72, 132-308 ; ix., 31, 179, 351 ; Macaulay's England, i., 48-62, 74-82, 160-166 ; Bancroft, i., 274-306, 460-469 ; Hildreth, i., 153-156 ; Young's " Chronicles of the Pilgrims," and "Chronicles of Massachusetts ;" Winthrop ; Morton ; Hubbard ; The Massachusetts Historical Collections ; The North American Review ; Coit's "Puritanism ;" and Hall's "Puritans and their Principles."
- -
115
PURITANS EMIGRATE TO HOLLAND.
recanted his opinions ; and the backsliding apostate was CHAP. IV. again received into the bosom of the Established Church. Nevertheless, most of the Non-conformists earnestly main- 1582. tained their ground. Opposition became one of their car- dinal maxims. Persecution soon followed non-conformity. But persecution in England only confirmed the faith and Persecu- brightened the zeal of the Puritans, as persecution in the tion. Netherlands had confirmed the faith and brightened the zeal of the Reformed.
The accession of James increased the severities of the 1603. hierarchy ; and the Puritans, obstinate in their opposition to the rigorous law, began to look for an asylum in other lands. They had long heard that in Holland there was " freedom of religion for all men;" and thither some of them determined to fly. Early in 1608, a number of these 1608. self-exiled Non-conformists, under John Robinson, their Emigration to Holland. minister, and William Brewster, their ruling elder, left the fens of Lincolnshire, and arrived at Amsterdam. In Hol- land they found "many goodly and fortified cities, strongly walled, and guarded with troops of armed men. Also, they heard a strange and uncouth language, and beheld the different manners and customs of the people, with their strange fashions and attires ; all so far differing from that of their plain country villages, wherein they were bred and born, and had so long lived, as it seemed they were come into a new world." The next year, they removed to the 1609. " fair and beautiful city" of Leyden, and organized their congregation under the ministry of Robinson. Here they throve apace, and at length " came to raise a competent and comfortable living." The Dutch allowed them full toleration, and showed them good-will and hospitality on every hand ; and the emigrants repaid this kindness by the most decorous observance of the municipal law .*
* Bradford, in Young's " Chronicles of the Pilgrims," 20-39. The treatment of the Puritans in Holland has been misrepresented by writers with English prejudices. Their condition was, unquestionably, necessitous-for they were fugitives ; and their lives were toilsome-for their Dutch hosts were themselves eminently industrious. But, by their own showing, the Puritans had "good and courteous entreaty" in Holland, and "lived there many years with freedom and good content."-Mass. Hist. Coll., iii., 52 ; ii., N. Y H. S. Coll. i., 361.
116
HISTORY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK.
1612. Sympathy with the Reformed Dutch Church.
CHAP. IV. The Puritan refugees in Holland found that their doc- trinal opinions agreed, essentially, with those held by a large and controlling majority of the Dutch clergy and people. Robinson himself could not refrain from taking a part in the controversy which was then raging between the Gomarists and the Remonstrants. He published sev- eral polemical dissertations ; and even disputed in public, at Leyden, with such ability, zeal, and "good respect," that he soon " began to be terrible to the Arminians" as a champion of Calvinistic orthodoxy .* The intolerance of the English hierarchy, and not the heterodoxy of the En- glish Articles of Religion, had induced the Puritans to de- sert their native land. Their opposition was not so much to the doctrines of the Anglican establishment, as to the ceremonials of her worship, and the aristocratic exclusive- ness of her domineering prelacy. In Holland they found an Established Church, whose canons of belief agreed, es- sentially, with those of the Church of England ; whose chief difference regarded the details of ecclesiastical gov- ernment.t As earnest and as venerable in her renuncia- tion of Rome, the Reformed Dutch Church, in her Litur- gy and her Articles of Religion, also rivaled her English contemporary in the orthodoxy of her faith and the stabil- ity of her forms. The most eminent pillars of the English establishment with Christian candor affirmed, that, in for- eign Reformed countries, those Churches which did not recognize a Prelacy " lost nothing of the true essence of a Church."# When English prelates and English church-
* Bradford, in Young's Chronicles, 41.
t " Whatever doubts may be raised as to the Calvinism of Cranmer and Ridley, there can surely be no room for any as to the chiefs of the Anglican Church under Elizabeth." "The works of Calvin and Bullinger became text-books in the English universities." Toward the end of the reign of James I., Calvinism gradually became unpopular at court. In the reign of Charles I., Laud's influence became so great that "to preach in favor of Calvinism, though commonly reputed to be the doctrine of the Church, incurred punish- ment in any rank. Davenant, bishop of Salisbury, one of the divines sent to Dort, and reckoned among the principal theologians of that age, was reprimanded, on his knees, be- fore the Privy Council for this offense. But in James's reign, the University of Oxford was decidedly Calvinistic ; and I suppose it continued so in the next reign, so far as the university's opinions could be manifested."-Hallam, Const. Hist., cap. vii., and note.
# Bishop Hall, x., 340 ; Bishop Davenant's " Adhortatio ad fraternam Communionem inter Evangelicas Ecclesias restaurandam," 1640.
117
THE DUTCH AND THE ENGLISH CHURCHES.
men went to Holland, they conformed, without scruple, to CHAP. IV. her established religion. At the command of James, a bishop, a dean, an archdeacon, and a professor of Theolo- gy in the Church of England, attended, as we have seen,
1619. The Re- formed Dutch a Synod at Dort, "of doctors not episcopally ordained, sat Church. with those doctors, preached to them, and voted with them on the gravest questions of theology."* And so highly was that " honorable, grave, and reverend" Assembly es- teemed, that the Dean of Worcester, after his elevation to the bishopric of Norwich, constantly wore the golden med- al which the States General presented to the foreign dele- gates attending the Synod. Not only did the head of the English Church, and the most enlightened English theo- logians under James, thus distinctly recognize the validity of the ordination of the Reformed clergy abroad, but they readily admitted them to livings in the Church of En- gland, without re-ordination by a bishop.t
In truth, the priesthood of the Netherlands was ordain- Its form of ed by the imposition of as holy hands as was the priest- ment. govern- hood of England, and it traced as unbroken a line of de- scent from the Apostles. But the Reformation in the Netherlands was essentially a spontaneous movement of the people. The political circumstances of the country encouraged the spread of the new doctrines. Yet there was not an entire unanimity. Among the laity, the no- bles remained, generally, attached to the Papal Church ; the advocates of the Reformed religion were, chiefly, the inferior gentry, the merchants, the artisans. In the body of the priesthood the same difference occurred. The rich- ly-beneficed prelates adhered to the Pontiff; the more popular clergy revolted. Not so in England. There the movement began at the throne ; and prelate and priest, with significant accord, obsequiously repudiated the supremacy of the Pope, and submissively acknowledged the suprema-
* Macaulay, i., 76 ; Hallam, Const. Hist., vii., note. "I shall take leave of this vener- able body with this further remark, that King James sending over divines to join this Assembly was an open acknowledgment of the validity of ordination by mere presbyters ; here being a bishop of the Church of England sitting as a private member in a synod of divines, of which a mere presbyter was the president."-Neal's Puritans, i., 265.
+ Bishop Hall, i., 32 ; x., 341 ; Lingard, ix., 147.
118
HISTORY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK.
Republican Episcopa- cy.
CHAP. IV. cy of the King. The religion of the sovereign was estab- 1619. lished as the religion of the kingdom ; but the hierarchy, under royal protection, continued, none the less than of old, to grow aristocratic, courtly, supercilious, and des- potic. In the Dutch provinces, however, the plebeian priesthood, deserted by the patrician prelacy, was re- strained to the Galilean platform of apostolic equality .* The Episcopacy of the Reformed Dutch Church, follow- ing the' popular impulse, naturally resumed a republican form; and each minister of that Church claims to be, and, by its canons, he is, the "bishop" or " overseer" of his own congregation, in subordination, alone, to the classes and synods of his peers.t Before the Reforma- tion, the faithful of Amsterdam had daily gathered around the four-and-thirty splendid altars which decorated the old cathedral church of Saint Nicholas. There the faith- ful worship now; but those altars have all disappeared. The bishop's throne no longer stands within the venerable choir. The only thrones which remain to the republican bishops of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church are thrones " not made with hands." But the monuments of the Admirals of Holland remain ; and the magnificent brazen gates; and the wonderful windows of painted glass ; and the organ continues to roll its notes through the ancient aisles of Saint Nicholas at Amsterdam, as deep- toned as through the arches of Saint Peter at Westminster.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.